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Sergej Hein came up with the idea for his Berlin Block Tetris animation walking through the streets of East Berlin when it struck him that the square blocks of the Plattenbauten (Soviet-era prefabricated concrete buildings) looked like Tetris pieces. Hein grew up in Riga but moved to East Berlin and lived in what he refers […]

A couple of weeks ago a mock up of a Lego Berghain / Panorama Bar caused a bit of a storm when it was posted on the Facebook page Just Berghain Things and now it actually exists. Clifford Irving, a DJ from London, has made a model of Berghain from official Lego parts and added flashing […]

Bite Club is a fortnightly summer street food event at a location next to the Spree near Badeschiff that includes the Hoppetosse, a former pleasure boat named after the boat in the Pippi Longstocking (Pippi Langstrumpf) stories. Street food has revolutionised and galvanised the Berlin food scene and recognising this new market Tommy Tannock and […]

In the summer Berliners go bonkers for ice cream and lots of these Eis crazy people head to Fräulein Frost for a scoop or two (and sometimes more) of the good stuff. Berlin’s schizophrenic weather means that no one is able to acclimatise to the summer heat – one minute it’s sub 20 degrees and […]

In a quiet cul-de-sac in Mitte alongside the Berliner-Spandau Schiffahrtskanal (Berlin Spandau Shipping Canal), the Gedenkstätte Günter Litfin is a former border watchtower has been lovingly restored as a memorial to Günter Litfin, one of the earliest victims of the Berlin wall and I’m sad to say I would advise you not to visit. Having described the […]

Legend has it that the Döner Kebap (Doner Kebab) was invented in Berlin in the 1970s and I have seen the discovery credited to both Kadir Nurman and Mehmet Aygün. Many however would dispute that either have any right to claim to have invented a snack that has existed in various forms for centuries. Regardless […]

Berlin Airlift: The Story of a Great Achievement is a film produced by the Central Office of Information (a British Government agency) to document the extraordinary events of 1948 and 1949 when thousands of tonnes of supplies were flown into West Berlin, thwarting Soviet plans to starve the city. If you were out and about […]

Berlin Dynamic is an exceptional timelapse video from Matthias Makarinus made up of over 50,000 photos shot between May 2010 and September 2011. I never get tired of watching this video, which was the first of Matthias Makarinus’ creations I saw, though three others have made it onto the blog before it. There are some […]

Bekarei is an absolute gem of a bakery in Prenzlauer Berg that makes some of the best bread and cakes that I have managed to track down in Berlin. I have the Sausage Man Never Sleeps to thank for introducing me to Bekarei. The bread he used for his BLT at The Breakfast Market was […]

About andBerlin

A blog about life in Berlin. My visits to the city's sights, attractions, bars and restaurants will hopefully be a helpful guide for anyone planning a trip or looking for things to do in the German capital.
Find out more about what brought me here on my About page.